Cascade sailboats for sale

Buying a used Cascade: know who finished the boat, not just who designed it

A Cascade began life, more often than not, as an unfinished hull: the small Portland, Oregon company behind the badge, Yacht Constructors, built much of its business serving amateur builders that larger yards turned away, and itself never grew past a dozen employees. That history means the badge alone doesn't say how a given boat was actually finished - whether the factory did the interior, plumbing, and rig, or an owner did decades ago, matters as much as the hull number. Add two separate design lineages under one company - Frederick Geiger's original Chinook 34 and Robert Smith's later Cascade series - and sorting out exactly what's being bought starts before the survey does.

Which era to target

The company's earliest boats, Geiger's Chinook 34, ran from the first hull in 1956 through the seventieth and last, shipped out in 1968 - a one-design line that ended once the Cascade series took over and its tooling was scrapped. Smith's Cascade series that followed spans the bulk of the used market: the 29 from 1961, the 42 from 1964, the 36 from 1967, and finally the 27 in 1978, each fin-keeled and hand-laid to the same era's standard. Boats built or sold after February 1989, when Tektronix engineer Hans Geerling bought the company and began planning a shift toward full-keel Jay Benford designs, sit outside that Smith-era design language entirely and are worth treating as a distinct chapter of the brand.

What to inspect across the range

Because so many hulls left the factory unfinished, the biggest variable across the range isn't the model - it's who completed the interior, plumbing, and rig, and how well. A kit-built Cascade is only as sound as its original owner's workmanship, in ways a factory-finished hull of the same model year wouldn't be. On the 36 and 44 specifically, there's a design quirk worth knowing going in: rigging loads on those boats run through an extruded-aluminum rail rather than through conventional chainplates, so their absence isn't a missing part - it's how Smith engineered the boat, worth confirming with an owner or a surveyor familiar with the line rather than flagging as a defect.

Navigating the lineup

Smith's fin-keel line runs from the compact 27 up through the 42, with the 29 the clear volume leader among them - sold in far greater numbers than any other Cascade, most within the design's first two decades on the market, and correspondingly the easiest to find parts, comparable listings, and owner knowledge for. The 36 and 44 add the rail-mounted rigging detailed above into the mix for buyers who want that feature specifically. The full model directory on this page breaks the size range down further.